Archive for November, 2008

The Embedded Event Manager (EEM) is nothing new to the IOS. It has been around for a long time but is very underutilized (mostly because people dont know about it).

EEM is great way for those who love scripting and automation to make your networking devices do some interesting things. How about having a script that automatically assigns VLAN and QoS configuration to an access port when detecting an IP phone connected (via CDP)? You can do all sorts of cool things. You can have a script that disables ports at certain times of the day to save power. It doesnt sound like much, but on a large scale it could be significant (great for companies trying to work on their green initiatives). Cisco is doing some cool things in the future regarding power savings.

On the voice side, I always hated having to track intermittent drop call issues. You can look at a trace and see the disconnect from your voice gateway, so you will want to look at Q931 debugs. Looking through a syslog server full of Q931 logs isnt going to be fun. (try a call center where hundreds of calls can come in on 5 different gateways with 5-6 PRIs each). What you can do is enable the 931 debug, use EEM to parse through the syslogs and when it finds a certain cause code or calling/called number, you can have it create a file on the flash with just the info you care about. You could also have it send a trap alerting you if you felt so inclined. Much easier than waiting on the customer to alert you when they have another dropped call, only to find out the traces are overwritten

Call home is a really cool feature that allows you to be a little more proactive on your network. Instead of relying on your SNMP poller (HP openview, CUOM) to provide you with your network health, the devices are becoming more intelligent.

Imagine a module failing in your switch over the weekend and it being smart enough to perform diagnostics (GOLD), open a TAC SR, and have the module there waiting for you on Monday (if needed right?). You could even integrate it into your current network operations and have it alert you and provide more intelligent alerts. I think it will probably help things get fixed faster and hopefully provide more meaningful alerts.

It’s not currently available on every platform since it’s still kind of new. You will find it on the following ::(more…)